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I finally got around to pulling some photos off of my camera from our trip to the Driftless Area a few weeks back! We caught some pretty sweet conditions and some even sweeter fish. I have never experienced anything quite like it, and this magic has definitely made it one of my new favorite places in the world. Now, prepare your vaseline.

This is Toupee Cow. His story is one of peril and sodomy, and he became almost a mascot for our five day adventure. This was taken on the morning of the first day. We approached one of the waters near the cabin we were staying in to find Toupee Cow and his family grazing lazily near the fence. As we poked fun at him, he arose from his meal and stared angrily at us. He spoke of foul farmers and dead grass. The story of how he came into existence involved a young Scandinavian boy, a 12 pack of Dropkick, and his mama cow. I will leave the rest to your imagination.

As I rounded the bend I found myself face to face with this magnificent Rainbow sipping a perpetual supply of hoppers floating down from an amazing riffle into slackwater. I tied on a deer hair hopper and shot a cast upstream, dropping the fly right into his feeding lane. As my fly drifted into his field of vision, I saw him look up then rise slowly, inhaling my hopper. I rose from the grass and made contact with him... he immediately went airborne then made two raging runs into the succeeding pool. I followed him and brought him delicately to my net. We then snapped this picture... I totally, 100%, did NOT catch this fish out of some dudes stocked spring pond. RIP Freddy.

I found Bambi. He was tasty.

A shot of our first morning... Pretty breathtaking.

My first brookie!

This one was taken the day before Ben and I bumped over to Minneapolis for the Carpicide tourney. Tons of rain caused basically every body of water in the immediate area to assume the form of a morning after Chipotle shit so we pulled out a map and picked out a campground close by to stay the night. We had arrived in the Viroqua area pretty early with intentions to fish for the day, so naturally we were pretty disappointed. Upon arrival to the campground, we found that there was a small creek running right by our spot. We eagerly approached only to find that it too was shit. We set up our tents and whipped up a few Carp flies at the picnic table. I went to take a piss in the creek and found that in the hour that it took us to set our shit up, it had cleared almost completely. We eagerly set up our gear, grabbed a couple of big ass Caddis like dries I had left over from the trip with Luke and Landon, and embarked upstream. Ben immediately rose one in a tiny pool right in the campground. We moved upstream and found countless other small pools where fish were holding. We probably hit 40 or so over the course of 3 hours or so. We followed the stream all the way to it's source which was pretty magical. It isn't often that you can explore a creek on a personal level like that... A collapsed barn was the only sign of human life we saw upstream...

These are just a few of my favorite photos. There were tons more taken that legitimately involved fishing, but those didn't seem worthy.